Coelebs: The Love Story of a Bachelor

“Don’t you think,” said Mr Musgrave uneasily, “that you are – frightening the child?”

Charlie Sommers looked at his brother-in-law with amusement.

“He is less frightened than you are,” he answered. “He is only bent on getting his own way. Ring the bell, Uncle John, for Eliza. John is going to tell her he is sorry.”

“I’m n-not sorry,” blubbered John.

“You will be presently. If you won’t tell Eliza you are sorry for kicking her I am going to spank you.”

Mr Musgrave rang the bell and Eliza answered it in person, looking more sour than usual by reason of her outraged feelings. When her glance fell on Master John Sommers, sulky and unrepentant, but decidedly less confident, she sniffed indignantly and looked with cold disapproval on the assembled group. Mr Musgrave walked away to the window and stood with his back to the room. For the first time since he had engaged her he was not sure that he approved of Eliza, and he had never before felt so irritated with her habit of sniffing.

“I regret to hear that my little boy has been rude to you,” Mr Sommers said. “I have troubled you to come here in order that he shall apologise. Now, John, tell Eliza that you are sorry for being naughty.”

“I’m – ”

John felt the sudden tightening of the hand upon his arm, and hesitated. Then he faced Eliza with all the malevolence which a small boy is capable of expressing in his countenance, and muttered ungraciously:

“I’m sorry, because I’ve got to be.”

“Try again,” said Mr Sommers relentlessly; and Eliza sniffed louder, her light eyes on the child’s angry face.

John capitulated before overwhelming odds.

“I’m sorry,” he said more politely, and looked at his foot in preference to Eliza’s hard face, the foot which had committed, the assault.

“I’ve never been accustomed to be treated like that by children,” said Eliza acidly. “Boys are troublesome, I know, but they oughtn’t to be rude. I’m not used to it. I wouldn’t take a place where there were children, especially boys – ”

“That will do, Eliza,” observed Mr Musgrave, turning round. “You may go.”

At the curt finality of his tone Eliza withered. For a moment she appeared to be about to break, forth again, but, changing her mind, sniffed herself out of the room and closed the door viciously. Charlie Sommers, still holding his son between his knees, gazed sternly into the small rebellious face.

“You cut away upstairs, John,” he said. “And if ever you kick anyone again I’ll whip you.”

He got up when his son, obeying his instructions with extraordinary alacrity, had made his exit, and faced his brother-in-law with a laugh.

“John,” he said, “I am of the opinion that the punishment was in excess of the fault. How can you endure that sour-faced she-devil in the house? The look of her is enough to put a man off his meals.”

“She is perhaps a little unsympathetic,” John Musgrave allowed, recalling the look in Eliza’s eyes while they had rested on the boy. “But she serves my purpose. In a bachelor establishment a middle-aged woman is more satisfactory than a – a younger person.”

“The single state has its disadvantages,” Charlie Sommers said. “If to employ an Eliza is the penalty for bachelorhood I’d sooner be a Mormon.”

“I really think,” remarked Belle, who during this discussion had been pursuing a train of thought of her own, “that John ought not to be allowed to go to the kinema party this afternoon. He deserves some punishment. A disappointment like that would leave a more lasting impression.”

“Isn’t that,” asked her brother quickly, “being unnecessarily severe? He is a very small sinner, remember.”

“You old dear?” she said, smiling. “You spoil that child. One has to be severe with John; he forgets his sins so readily.”

“So did you when you were his age,” he answered. “As far as my memory serves, you were indulged more than John is; and I don’t think it had a deteriorating effect on your character.”

“That settles it,” Charlie Sommers put in. “John goes to the Hall.”

So John went to the Hall, and in a burst of confidence after the performance confessed to Peggy his wickedness of the morning, for which he expressed still an unrepentant spirit. Peggy carried him for punishment to the mistletoe and kissed him, struggling and resisting, beneath the bough, to Mr Musgrave’s open amusement. He wriggled away from her, and pointing a chubby finger at his uncle commanded her to punish Uncle John too.

“But Uncle John doesn’t merit punishment,” she said, with a bright blush and laughter in her eyes.

“That form of punishment is another special privilege, John,” Mr Musgrave remarked, with his gaze on Peggy’s rosy face.

“It is a special privilege which is any man’s due,” broke in Charlie Sommers, coming up and catching Peggy round the waist and kissing her soundly, “when a girl stands deliberately under the mistletoe.”

Mr Musgrave, who had witnessed this attack with amazement, turned away with a sense of annoyance at his brother-in-law’s bucolic humour. To kiss a woman beneath the mistletoe appeared to him as vulgar as kissing her without that flimsy excuse. He was surprised that Peggy did not show greater resentment at this treatment.

Charlie Sommers and Peggy looked at Mr Musgrave’s retreating back, and then at one another, and smiled.

“You have disgusted Mr Musgrave,” she said.

“I rather suspect him of jealousy,” he replied. “He hadn’t spunk enough or he’d have done the same himself.”

She flushed quickly.

“John would never be guilty of impertinence,” she returned.

“His sins are those of omission,” he retorted. “I think John’s an ass.”

“I think he is an eminently discreet and comfortable person,” she replied. “I should never feel afraid of mistletoe in his presence.”

“It appears to me,” he observed, eyeing the mistletoe above her head, “that you do not show particular trepidation in regard to the plant in anyone’s presence.”

Peggy received this remark in scornful silence. It is not always the case that a woman enjoys the last word.

But later in the afternoon, when John Musgrave was departing and she was wishing him good-bye, standing beneath the identical branch of mistletoe in the big dim hall, she saw his eyes travel to the bough and then to her lips, and she stood looking at him, smiling and ironical. John Musgrave might be an eminently discreet and comfortable person, but he was not without certain human weaknesses.

“The druids regarded it as a sacred plant,” he remarked, feeling constrained to say something on observing her gaze follow his.

“Did they? They were rather musty old people, weren’t they?”

“I think,” he returned, “that perhaps I am a little musty too.”

He took her hand and raised it and kissed it – under the mistletoe. There was in his action in doing this something so courtly and respectful, something so much more impressive in its significance than in Charlie Sommers’ careless embrace, that Peggy found, herself blushing warmly, felt her cheeks glow and her eyes grow bright as Mr Musgrave very gently released her hand and stood again erect, tall and unsmiling, while he bade her farewell. She felt like one of the gentlewomen of bygone times who smiled down at her from faded frames on the walls and who would have curtsied sedately in response to this respectful salutation. Peggy had an idea that she ought to curtsey: instead she said gaily:

“I’m so glad you came. It has been a ripping afternoon, hasn’t, it?”

Later, in the solitude of her own room, seated in a low chair before the fire, resting between the kinema entertainment of the afternoon, which had been for the young people of the village, and a similar entertainment to be held the same evening for the older inhabitants, her idle hands lying listlessly over the arms of her chair, a mischievous smile playing about her lips, she pictured the scene again, and Mr Musgrave’s face, and laughed softly. A pleasing light of satisfaction shone in her eyes, the satisfaction which a woman knows when she realises the sense of her own power.

“I believe,” she said, half aloud, which, since there was no one present to overhear her, was immaterial, “that John is falling in love with me.”

The dimple at the corner of her mouth deepened and the laughter in her eyes increased. Peggy was conscious of a feeling of triumph. She liked people to fall in love with her. She experienced a distinct disinclination, however, to fall in love herself. She was a very long way, she believed, from falling in love with fossilised John Musgrave.

Chapter Eighteen